Latest / Common Sense Health / Why Vegans Get Human Teeth Wrong
Transcript
- Stephen Thomas BSc. Hons: Hello. Now. If I had a pound for every time a high profile vegan or frugivore influencer tells me I'm not designed to eat meat because I don't look like Wolverine, I'd have enough money to buy a very decent herd of grass-fed cattle actually. it is surprisingly common, claim that circulates online, that, well, you've probably seen it, someone holds up a picture of a lion with a big gawping jaw next to a human smile and declares, look at your teeth, look at your hands, you don't have fa- you don't have sharp claws, so you're obviously meant to be eating bananas. That's a beautifully simple argument, isn't it? But it is completely absurd. Those advocates love to compare human teeth and human hands and intestine length and stomach acid to those that obligate herbivores or free-teaters, and they always conclude that we are biologically destined for a life of smoothies and salads. Well, using a bit of join up thinking, I'd like to take a closer look at these claims, because when you actually examine the wider animal kingdom and this whole fangs and claws argument, it falls apart very fast, actually. It's a pretty easy thing to unpick. So we're going to start with teeth. The argument relies on a massive assumption. Big fangs equal a meat diet and flat teeth equal a plant diet. Now, if that were a biological rule, we'd need to have a series This is a sharp teeth and sharp claws. Take the tacia. I mean, it's a tiny wide-eyed primitive with hands that look eerily like ours. Long, delicate fingers without a sharp retractable claw in sight. Yet the tacia is the only entirely carnivorous primate on earth. It fasts, by the way, exclusively on insects, birds and lizards. Now, if the frugivore logic held any water, well, they would find the ocean pretty confusing as well. If you look at the penguin, here's one here I made earlier, he wears a tuxedo. The bottles are round on the ice, equipped with zero fangs, zero claws, and no comical flippers. Yet, penguins are actually apex aquatic carnivores. They subsist entirely on fish, squid and krill. They don't need to slash their prey to ribbons. They simply catch it and just swallow it whole. And the ocean, the way, is teeming with these contradiction busting carnivores. know, dolphins are apex predators, so they have conical teeth just meant for grabbing. No chewing, no tearing and certainly no claws as well, by the way. And the blue whale is the largest animal to have ever lived and it doesn't even have teeth. has these plates to filter feed on tiny crustaceans. So the biggest creature on earth is a pure carnivore and it doesn't have a single fang. It doesn't have a single claw. And you could look at seahorses. I mean, they don't have teeth, they don't even have a stomach. They literally just suck up tiny crustaceans whole, but they are 100 % carnivore. And let's not forget birds. I mean, always having to go to the birds now. They have no teeth at all, just beaks of all different shapes and sizes. And your eagles, hawks, falcons and owls are some of the most efficient 100 % carnivorous hunters on the planet. So nature simply doesn't care about your neat Disney-fied categories of what a predator should look like, the plant-based advocates also attempt to play fast and loose with human physiology. Given my background in physiology and health sciences, this is where I do get little bit fed up that they continually make this claim, and that's that the human intestines are 9 to 12 times our body length, aligning us with herbivores, and while carnival guts are much shorter. Well, you can check that this is wrong. mean, it just is. You can take a standard physiology textbook and the average human intestine is about 26 feet long and the average human is around six foot. So that makes our intestines roughly five times our body length, which coincidentally is exactly the same ratio you'd find in a lion. It's just pure fabrication. And then there's the stomach acid. The colobus monkey is a true frugivore and its stomach pH sits rather gentle five to seven, which is good for fermentation by the way. Now the human stomach acid rests between a roughly acidic 1 to 2 and you know what else has a stomach pH of 1 to 2 scavengers and obligate carnivores We have a stomach designed to dissolve meat and neutralize pathogens not to gently ferment fruit So what this fangs and claws argument does is lazily cherry-pick superficial anatomical features whilst completely ignoring our actual biological nutritional requirements and what we look like now if we were truly meant to live on fruit and leaves, those foods would provide everything we need to thrive. But fruit and leaves don't. A frugivore diet contains no bioavailable B12, ⁓ D3, ⁓ retinol, ⁓ EPA, choline, ⁓ carnitine or And these are not optional extras, these are nutrients essential to human life and brain function, cellular health and they are found perfectly packaged in animal foods. ⁓ Now you ask, If all these things are absent on a vegan or frugivore diet, how on earth do they survive without eating animal? products. And the short answer is to cope. A modern vegan has to look at a cocktail of synthetic supplements or fortified ultra processed foods and heavy reliance on the body's highly inefficient ability to convert plant precursors into the animal forms our bodies actually use. For many, they simply survive by slowly depleting their own tissue stores over periods of years until the metabolic cracks finally start to show. So B12 can be stored for a ⁓ long time for example. Now, here is what you miss if you take animal foods off of the menu. Vitamin B12. Now we know that is essential for maintaining a healthy nervous system and synthesizing DNA and red blood cells. simply does not exist in the plant kingdom in a form that animals, humans can use. Now, vegans absolutely must supplement this or they risk severe irreversible neurological damage. Then you come on to D3 and K2, the dynamic duo of calcium, D3, the animal form which is superior to D2 from plants, regulates immune function and absorbs calcium. Vitamin K2 is the traffic cop that directs the calcium into your bones and your teeth and keeps it out of the soft tissues and arteries. And you will find them beautifully packaged in egg yolks and in dairy and animal fats, but you won't find K2 in a bowl of lentils. Retinol, the true vitamin A, which is crucial for vision and skin health and a robust best immune system. Well, plants do not contain retinol. They contain beta carotene. Now the human body has to convert beta carotene into retinol. And for many people, this conversion rate is a bit of a genetic lottery. And some people have a sort of less than 10 % efficiency. A carrot is simply not a substitute for liver or butter, DHA and EPA. Now these long chain omega-3 fatty acids They literally build the human brain naturally and manage systemic inflammation. Now plant foods like flax seeds provide ALA, a short chain omega-3. The human conversion rate of ALA to DHA and EPA is frankly abysmal, usually about 5%. To get these crucial brain builders, you need seafood or ruminant fat. Then we come onto choline, which is vital for liver function and the production, obviously, of acetylcholine, a neurotransmitter which is critical for memory and mood. amounts in some plants, you would have to eat absolute bucket loads of them to match the highly bioavailable choline found in a couple of eggs or even in a steak. Then we come on to creatine and carnitine. Now the biological energy engines is what they're called. So creatine recycles ATP, cellular energy for explosive muscle power and cognitive function. Carnitine literally ferries fatty acids into your mitochondria so they can be burned for fuel. Now both are virtually non-existent implant feds. In fact the clue is in their name. They derive from Creus for creatine and Carnus carnitine, the Greek and Latin words for meat. And taurine, an amino acid essential for cardiovascular health and antioxidant defense as well and the formation of bile salts which you need to digest fats properly. Once again taurine is entirely absent from the plant kingdom. Now when you look at this list through the lens of common sense and joined up thinking, the biological reality becomes impossible to ignore. We are not designed to scrape by on synthetic pills and inefficient plant conversions. We are designed to thrive on a nutrient dense, highly bioavailable matrix found in animal foods. Really is that simple. The real world evidence is tragically clear for vegans and frugivores. There are numerous documented cases including high profile public figures who have suffered from malnutrition and sometimes tragically died trying to force a frugivore diet to work. Conversely, in the ketone carnivore communities, see thousands upon thousands of people completely reverse chronic metabolic issues, including reversing type 2 diabetes, and they seem to thrive on long term fatty meat diets. You will struggle to find a medical case study of someone dying of malnutrition because they only ate rumen. meat that just doesn't exist. So what are humans supposed to eat? Well the answer isn't found by looking at our teeth and our fingernails and wishing the fingernails were actually talons. That's not the way to do it. We don't need fangs or claws because as a species our evolutionary advantage wasn't our physical weaponry. It was our brains. We learned to craft tools and harness fire and cook meat. This allowed us to extract massive amounts of dense nutrition with far less digestive effort further fueling the growth of that very same brain. don't need to look like a cyber tooth tiger to enjoy a rib eye. You just need a bit of common sense, a knife and a fork and leave the fangs to Dracula and let's be honest if he was living in a dark castle all day he'd probably be deficient in vitamin D anyway. remember if you like this please consider liking sharing and subscribing and if you want to join a community of like-minded individuals then there are links to my on my community in the description to this video. That noise indicates that we've finished with all the information. I hope you've enjoyed it and if you've got to the end and you didn't enjoy it, I do appreciate the fact that you at least heard me out. I look forward to seeing you all on the next one.